by Daša Drndic
I was four in 1941, Helga said. It was a cold autumn evening. She said, I am leaving. She said, So, auf Wiedersehen, meine Kleine. She picked up her suitcase and left, Helga said. She didn’t kiss me. She didn’t say where she was going, why she was leaving, when she would be back. My brother was still an infant, and he was asleep. We were left alone, Helga said. Then we cried, we howled, because our father was off fighting, I don’t know where, all I know is that he was fighting for the Führer and the Fatherland. Then my father’s mother came from Poland, Grandma Emma, whom we loved, but father remarried soon and he sent Grandma Emma back to Poland, and mama’s name, Traudi, was never mentioned again in our household, Helga said. Traudi is dead, father said, dead, remember that, he said. His new wife didn’t like me. She loved my brother. I got on her nerves, Helga said, so she dumped me in a reformatory, and afterwards sent me to a school for problem children, although I don’t know why. I asked them, my father and my stepmother, Why am I a problem? What have I done? and they said, You’re untidy. You’re messy all over, especially in your head. I would see my mother again only thirty years later, in 1971, Helga said. But I did see Hitler. In December 1944 I was seven and still living at home and someone organized a visit to Hitler’s bunker for children of high-ranking parents. It was festive. We were supposed to shake hands with the Führer. Special children of tried-and-true Nazis went, not just anyone, Helga said. So we, my brother and I, went. The food was decorated beautifully. There was a lot set out to eat and plenty of colours. We could hardly wait for the handshaking to be over, Helga said, so we could eat. Then the Führer arrived, and he walked terribly slowly, dragged his feet, his footsteps slid as if snakes were slithering over the stone floor and hissing. Hitler walked hissing his feet, Helga said, all hunched over and grey, and while he was walking towards us, his head shook and his left arm hung there, swinging like a long, dead fish, Helga said, as if it were made of modelling clay, she said. He extended to me the other hand, the one that wasn’t dangling and looked me straight in the eyes and I froze. I saw his pupils dancing, Helga said, and I waited for some evil little man to come leaping out of his eyes and drag me away with him. Hitler’s handshake was soft, limp, Helga said, and the palm of his hand was moist. This is like holding a frog, I thought. And his cheeks sagged. Everything on him sagged. He had bags under his eyes. He was all flab. Only his moustache stood firm. Then he asked me, What’s your name, dear? and I told him, Helga. I said only Helga, but forgot to add “mein Führer”, which was a serious omission, Helga said, but my brother did not forget to say “mein Führer”, my brother said it at least two, possibly three times, “mein Führer”, “mein Führer”. Then the hostess came and gave us each a bar of marzipan. We didn’t get any of the lovely food, just a little marzipan bar each. Then the war ended, Helga said, but the hunger did not, and the great chaos became even greater. Father came back from the front. He decided in 1948 to take up residence once more in his homeland, Austria, which had reinstated its name and borders, which once again belonged only to itself. So we left Germany forever, Helga said. Things at home turned from bad to worse because of my stepmother, so one night, Helga said, I ran away and never went back. That’s when I got work at Isabella’s, she said, and I also washed glasses at a Salzburg beer hall where it wasn’t too bad. I could have lunch there, mostly sausages, and all the beer I wanted to drink. Then I finished secondary school, Helga said, and played little supporting roles in an experimental basement theatre, a Kellertheater, she said, and then I went to Vienna, and in Vienna I posed at the Kunstakademie for students and met Oskar Kokoschka. I rented two machines in Vienna: one for sewing, a hand-driven Singer (today that Singer is probably a museum piece), and one for writing, because I wanted to write about my life. I used the sewing machine to alter second-hand clothes I bought at the flea market for practically nothing, and on the typewriter I wrote a novel about my life that nobody was eager to publish. A publisher finally did offer me a small advance, however, and with it, Helga said, my friend and I went to Italy for a break, and in Italy I met a wonderful young man, Helga said, my future husband, and, to keep the story short, she said, we had a son. His name is Renzo. I worked as a foreign correspondent, I learned Italian, after many years everything was good, life in general, my schöne Zeiten have come, she said. When my son was born, my mother-in-law called him il piccolo Austriaco and those words stirred memories of my mother, and I thought to myself, Say, Helga, now you are a mother, but whatever happened to your mother? so I decided to look for her, maybe retrieve the mother I never had, my son would have another grandmother, that would be nice, ah, yes. I wrote to my father, Helga said, and asked if he knew anything about my mother, where she was, what she was up to, and he answered, I have no idea and I don’t care, it would be best to forget her, he said, Helga said. Nevertheless I went looking for my mother, though I knew nothing about her. The only thing I knew for sure, Helga said, was that both of them, my mother and my father, were born in Vienna, she said, so my reasoning was that if she’d survived the war, she must have gone back to her city. I asked a Viennese friend, Susanna, to check the register of births, marriages and deaths, to search the phone books for everybody with the surname of Schneider, then I wrote to five women and one of them wrote back to say, It’s me, that’s me, Helga said. Then I told my husband, I’ve found my mother and now I’m going to Vienna and taking Renzo with me, so he can meet his grandmother. In Vienna I found a vigorous, good-looking, sixty-year-old woman who took me straight to her bedroom, showing no interest in Renzo, she just gave him a glass of milk and some biscuits, she took me to her bedroom, Helga said, opened the wardrobe, pulled out some sort of uniform and said, Here, try this on, I want to see how it fits. I didn’t understand, Helga said, I thought, that must be a theatre costume, I was totally ignorant, because at that point I knew nothing about my mother’s life, Helga said. Then I asked her, Why? and she said, Just put it on, for years I’ve been wanting to see you in that uniform, and again I asked, Why, and she said, Because I wore this uniform at Birkenau. So, Helga Schneider said, after thirty years I had in front of me not a mother, but a monster. And this monster, this woman who gave birth to me, was standing there smiling and saying over and over, Es war so schön, so schön! I will not put on this uniform; it’s soaked with blood, I told her, Helga said, at which point Traudi Schneider pulled out a handful of jewellery she had looted from the victims of Auschwitz and Ravensbrück and said, Here, take this. I grabbed Renzo and flew out into the street and realized that I have no mother, that I’ve never had a mother and that I will somehow have to get along without a mother, said Helga. Life went on. Renzo grew up, my husband died of cancer, and I dug around in the archives and dossiers and got to know the life story of this S.S. camp guard, this fanatical-unto-death Nazi, Traudi Schneider. Then in 1998 a letter in an ugly pink envelope arrived from Vienna. Your mother is in a nursing home, wrote a “close friend of Traudi Schneider”, Helga said. Your mother is nearly ninety, wrote the friend. At times she loses her grip and she may die soon, she wrote, why wouldn’t the two of you meet once more, she wrote, After all, she is your mother. I say to myself, she may be feeling remorse, Helga said, so I go to Vienna, I buy flowers and visit the nursing home. I find a thin old woman, weighing less than forty-five kilos, frail and neglected, and I feel sorry for her. I am your daughter, I tell her, Helga said, and Traudi Schneider shrieks, You are not my daughter, my daughter is dead, if you are my daughter, call me Mutti, children call their mothers Mutti, shouted Traudi Schneider, and then pinched me on the cheek, and I couldn’t say Mutti, I couldn’t utter that word Mutti, and then Traudi Schneider said, Just so you know, I was the strictest guard there, she said, I beat the inmates and they spat blood, she said. Then she straightened up, Helga said, and started describing the horrors of the medical experiments, and she said, Of course I was in favour of the Final Solution, why do you think I went there, for a holiday? And then she said, in those chambers, not everyone died at the same rate, she said, b
abies took only a few minutes, we’d pull out some who were stiff and bright blue, and sometimes there wasn’t room in the crematoria, so we shot people in the head. We would line the Jews up along the edge of a huge pit and shoot, and they’d fall into the pit, all of them, men and women and children in the arms of their mothers, and I shot, of course I shot, I was a crack shot, said Traudi Schneider, smiling, O, schöne Zeiten, she said, Helga said, and once, Traudi said, two Jewish whores got into a fight over a crust of stolen bread and we saw it, we saw everything, those whores, and we took them off to be shot, naked, naked, of course, and torn up, with open gashes all over, because before that they had been lying in the punishment cell for fourteen days in the dark, with rats as fat as cats feeding on them, nearly eating them alive. That’s why they were covered in wounds, and when we pulled them out, they were already mad from the horror and they could hardly wait to get a bullet in the head. I hated those damned Jews, ugh! A horrible race, a terrible race, believe me, revolting. And then I screamed, said Helga, I screamed, Enough, stop, I’ve read all your files, I already know all that, enough’s enough, and I left, I went back to Bologna. I had terrible nightmares and my heart pounded as if Traudi Schneider were jumping inside it with a pistol in her hand and howling, Let me out! I’ll shoot if you don’t let me out, I’ll kill you! And then the doctors gave me some pills and now my heart is as quiet as if it had died.
Karl-Otto Saur Junior is still wearing his hair long to hide the bull neck he inherited from his father, the sturdy Karl-Otto Saur Senior, the last head of the technical office at the Armaments Ministry of the Third Reich, whom Hitler, in his crazy will of 1945, named as Speer’s successor. Karl-Otto Saur comes through the Nuremberg trial with no conviction, because he agrees to testify against Krupp in the Krupp Affair. Karl-Otto Saur embarks on a better life in 1946, released from charges and guilt, even from the guilt of employing hundreds of thousands of Hungarian Jews in the production of weapons for exterminating the selfsame Hungarian Jews he “employed”, which was evident, later, at the Wehrmacht exhibition in Berlin and cities throughout Germany, at which point I see many events much clearer, and because of this monstrous clarity I sleep less and nauseatingly badly. This same Karl-Otto Saur Senior, the one who opens up an engineering office after the war and then starts a publishing firm, which thrives today under the guidance of his elder son Klaus-Gerhard Saur, has descendants whose hair is unusually shaggy, reaching down to their shoulders, as if with their long hair his descendants will cover the possibility of history repeating itself, but they won’t, with their long hair they’ll cover nothing but their necks, so reminiscent of the neck of their father. We should probably be able to learn something from the repetition of history, repetitio est mater studiorum, but despite the fact that history stubbornly repeats itself, we are bad learners, and History, brazen and stubborn, does not desist, it goes right on repeating and repeating itself, I will repeat myself until I faint, it says, I will repeat myself to spite you, it says, until finally you come to your senses, it says, yet we do not come to our senses, we just grow our hair, hide and lie and feign innocence. Besides, for some of us, those of us who like Santa Claus lug sacks on our backs, sacks brimming with the sins of our ancestors, History has no need to return, History is in our marrow, and here, in our bones, it drills rheumatically and no medicine can cure that. History is in our blood and in our blood it flows quietly and destructively, while on the outside there’s nothing, on the outside all is calm and ordinary, until one day, History, our History, the History in our blood, in our bones, goes mad and starts eroding the miserable, crumbling ramparts of our immunity, which we have been cautiously raising for decades.
At this point I, Hans Traube, do some research, and I learn that Hermine Braunsteiner was born in Vienna in 1919, that she was raised in a strict Catholic family, that she joined the S.S. in 1939, and from then on worked as a guard at the concentration camps in Poland. I learn that the Austrian Court for War Crimes sentences Hermine Braunsteiner to three years in prison in 1948 and that she is released nine months later by that same court. I learn that until 1957 Hermine Braunsteiner works as a saleswoman in picturesque tourist towns in Austria, then meets her future husband, an American called Russell Ryan, and goes with him first to Halifax, Canada, then to the United States. I learn that Hermine Braunsteiner-Ryan lives in peace until 1968, when she is discovered by Simon Wiesenthal, and thanks to Wiesenthal is extradited to Germany and tried in Düsseldorf for the murder of “at least 1,181 camp inmates” and for being a co-perpetrator in the murder of another 705 persons. She is sentenced in 1981 when she is sixty-one and has many lovely memories, when she remembers her happy days, when she has grown children, American, who might cherish an affection for whips and high boots. Of course, these little histories that I research surface only after 1998, because until 1998, until Martha Traube informs me of the agonizing truth of my birth, I dig into nothing, into no past, just as many others never do, why should they, life goes on, look to the future, people tell themselves, tell them, tell us, everybody says so, at home, at school, on stage, parents say so, friends say so, and politicians, priests say so, and the Church. Then, when I least expected it, the Past jumped out at me in a flash, hop! like a carcass, like some rotten corpse, it draped itself around my neck, plunged its claws into my artery and it still isn’t letting go. I’d like to shake it off, this Past, but it won’t let me, it swings on me as I walk, it lies on me while I sleep, it looks me in the eyes and leers, See, I’m still with you. Like Hermine Braunsteiner’s boots, the Past, my Past, our Past, presses up against my face, which, beneath it, contorts in a grimace like the grimace of a crazed detainee whose innocence or guilt has yet to be determined.
Listen, my colleague says to me, Tipura said, this Stille Hilfe is a fairly repulsive organization and it is run by Frau Gudrun Burwitz, who is actually Frau Gudrun Himmler, says my colleague, Tipura told me. So off we went to see what’s what. Time has stopped for Gudrun, but on the other hand it hasn’t. Gudrun’s name is no longer Himmler but Burwitz, yet she behaves like a Himmler and dreams Himmlerian dreams, said Tipura. Gudrun Himmler Burwitz’s daughter is neither a Himmler nor a Burwitz, women have it easier, they can always take their husband’s name, right? said Tipura, though men can change their names too, when necessary, why not? There, in Gudrun Himmler Burwitz’s house, we met her daughter, who was very upset by our visit, Tipura said. Gudrun Himmler Burwitz’s adult daughter was completely beside herself when we came. She leapt at us, don’t you dare air my mother’s name in public, she threatened, Tipura said. None of my friends know who my mother is, cried Gudrun Himmler’s daughter, even my husband doesn’t know, she said, Tipura told me, which was remarkable information for me, Tipura said. What about Himmler’s children born out of wedlock, the two Himmler had with his secretary Hedwig Potthast, who he moved into a newly furnished villa near the rest of Hitler’s cronies so that everything would be as she wished? What about Helge Potthast Himmler, born in 1942, and his sister Nanette Dorothea Potthast Himmler, born two years later? wondered Walter Tipura. If they are alive, what do they tell their children and grandchildren? Do any former Nazis and their descendants suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder? Do they ever manifest symptoms of P.T.S.D., little hints suggesting that their soul is attacking their body and their body is burrowing through their soul? Katrin Himmler, the daughter of Heinrich’s nephew, a 37-year-old scientist, married to a Jew (I no longer see this as coincidence), a Jew whose relatives disappeared in the Polish death camps, is beside herself: I dread the day I will have to tell my son that one half of his family exterminated the other half, says Katrin Himmler, Tipura told me. She dreads it so much that she started writing books about it, about Heinrich Himmler’s brothers, about their children, who are her uncles, Tipura said.
I know that coincidences are rare, perhaps there are no coincidences, there is only our stupid and superstitious need to duck behind our own carnival life which prances by us. Our coincidences, which are actu
ally our pasts, we bury under our family trees on which grow berries full of sweet poison. It is no coincidence that my friend Wolfgang, who works at the Austrian Documentation Centre for the Reparation of Victims of the War, pursuing the dirty past of the by now already senile murderers condemned to a quiet demise, and searching for stolen artworks in the well-concealed safes of their descendants, remembers how, after the war, the cronies and fellow fighters of his Nazi grandfather went to the Berlin Opera in a long line of black limousines, seeking respite from their memories. I know it is no coincidence that Wolfgang’s mother, the daughter of a militant Nazi who after the war sat serenely in his loge at the Berlin Opera in blessed oblivion, focusing totally on the music that nourished his soul, that Wolfgang’s mother married the son of a rebellious anarchist who met his end (by secret order of Stalin) in a Siberian backwater. It is no coincidence that Serge Klarsfeld, born in 1935 in Bucharest, whose father dies in Auschwitz, falls in love with Beate Künzel, born in 1939 in Berlin, the daughter of a member of the Wehrmacht, who learns more about the horrors of the Holocaust when she is in Paris in 1963. It is no coincidence that Beate and Serge become Nazi hunters and manage to drag the “butcher of Lyons”, Klaus Barbie, from Bolivia to his Paris trial. It is no coincidence that there are so few random coincidences and there is so much repressed ressentiment. People wash themselves any way they know, heal themselves as best they can, find straits through which they navigate quietly, on tiptoe, to avoid, at all costs, meeting themselves. Who can keep track of all these branchings? No-one, because all those branches proliferate and proliferate, because families grow and spread, because families have a name (and behind every name there is a story). Unless those family branches interlace once and for all, just as that worm coiled itself around the eye of that frantic, unfortunate woman from a civilized European country, and unless, thus entangled, those branches penetrate into the centre of the pustule which becomes the axis of their silenced past, unless they reach the roots of their trees, their axis steeped in putrid pus, there can be no salvation for those who remain and those to come. The story lasts as long as the past, forever. Ah yes, that hurts, I know.